VMware Releases Free Version of Micro Cloud Foundry

VMware today released a free downloadable version of its Cloud Foundry software, called Micro Cloud Foundry, designed to run locally on a developer’s workstation in a single virtual machine. The idea is that developers working on either a Mac or PC will be able to run and build cloud applications locally without having to configure middleware, and scale and deploy their applications wherever they want without modifying code.

Launched earlier this year, VMware’s Cloud Foundry (cloudfoundry.com) combines a hosted platform as a service (PaaS) running on VMware’s vSphere with an open-source development stack (cloudfoundry.org). According to the company, Micro Cloud Foundry is a complete version of Cloud Foundry that will remain in a controlled beta for the next month.

In a blog posted today, VMware’s CTO, Steve Herrod, wrote that “Micro Cloud Foundry is a developer focused offering, designed to support development and testing use-cases.” Micro Cloud Foundry gives developers a choice of frameworks to work with including the Spring framework for Java developers, Ruby on Rails, and Node.js. Micro Cloud Foundry also supports Grails and other JVM-based frameworks, MongoDB, MySQL, and Redis application services.

InfoQ spoke with VMware’s David McJannet and asked whether Micro Cloud Foundry would support services introduced with vFabric, which was introduced two weeks ago. vFabric includes the tcServer app server, GemFire for data management, Hyperic to manage application performance, ers (enterprise-ready server) for dynamic load balancing and RabbitMQ, a queueing service for handling messaging traffic. “VMware wants to maintain symmetry between cloudfoundry.com, cloudfoundry.org and Micro Cloud Foundry,” according to McJannet. Micro Cloud Foundry will support RabbitMQ in the near term. “GemFire is something that will make it in over time,” said McJennet.

According to McJennet, developers will be able to run from 6 to 12 applications depending on available memory and application requirements. Micro Cloud Foundry comes as a virtual machine image compatible with VMware Fusion for MacOSX, VMware Workstation and VMware Player for Linux and Windows. A prerequisite is that you have an account and workspace setup at cloudfoundry.com.